Object storage has emerged as the preferred method of storing and retaining large data repositories, which may be utilized for a variety of purposes, including data mining, artificial intelligence training data, or mandated data retention. Object storage systems are able to scale to multiple peta-bytes of data, with billions of objects without performance degradation.

The use cases for Object storage systems differs from traditional application workloads due to the nature of their design and the requirement for close application interaction with these systems. Object storage systems maintain limited data about each object, which requires applications to maintain data via other mechanisms. Additionally, these applications and storage systems are designed for massive scale with deployments using on premise clouds, public clouds or some combination of both.

The Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) is an object-based storage system designed for long-term archiving or retention of fixed content data. HCP supports configurations up to multiple Exabyte capacity. HCP’s scalability includes multitenant management, delegation and provisioning features, along with scalable front-end and back-end storage components to enable the scaling of object access and storage capacity independently. Additionally, a number of HCP data services exist including capacity balancing, compression, garbage collection, replication, storage tiering and geo-distribution of data.

However, with multiple object processing or front-end nodes, applications may overload a particular node while leaving other nodes idle. An important consideration in achieving optimal performance is balancing workloads across the entire object storage deployment. Workload variations may arise from a few high- demand applications or may be due to object-based applications serving as a repository for hundreds or thousands of applications. In both instances a web application load balancer can help alleviate hot-spots or overloading of individual nodes and evenly distribute workloads across systems in an object storage cluster.

In this Lab Insight, Evaluator Group analyzed Hitachi Content Platform using multiple different workloads and configurations, with a primary focus on evaluating the effect of a vADC load-balancer with each configuration.

The benefits of using vADC included:

•  Performance 3X – 4X that of systems without vADC for single applications (200% – 300% increase)
•  Increased object access rates for all tests, measured by the number of objects accessed per second
•  Increased throughput rates for all tests, measured by data transfer rate per second

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